Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
A fully statistical approach to natural language interfaces
ACL '96 Proceedings of the 34th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
A portable natural language interface for diverse databases using ontologies
CICLing'03 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing
Shedding Light on a Troublesome Issue in NLIDBS
TSD '08 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue
Dialogue manager for a NLIDB for solving the semantic ellipsis problem in query formulation
KES'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Knowledge-based and intelligent information and engineering systems: Part II
MICAI'06 Proceedings of the 5th Mexican international conference on Artificial Intelligence
Semantic model for improving the performance of natural language interfaces to databases
MICAI'11 Proceedings of the 10th Mexican international conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence - Volume Part I
International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems - Selected papers of KES2012-Part 1 of 2
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We present a method for creating natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) that allow for translating natural language queries into SQL. The method is domain independent, i.e., it avoids the tedious process of configuring the NLIDB for a given domain. We automatically generate the domain dictionary for query translation using semantic metadata of the database. Our semantic representation of a query is a graph including information from database metadata. The query is translated taking into account the parts of speech of its words (obtained with some linguistic processing). Specifically, unlike most existing NLIDBs, we take seriously auxiliary words (prepositions and conjunctions) as set theory operators, which allows for processing more complex queries. Experimental results (conducted on two Spanish databases from different domains) show that treatment of auxiliary words improves correctness of translation by 12.1%. With the developed NLIDB 82of queries were correctly translated (and thus answered). Reconfiguring the NLIDB from one domain to the other took only ten minutes.